Last week we discussed the concept of renewing our minds as parents–learning new truth about training our children–as a means of resisting the enemy’s attempts to steal our heritage away from God’s purpose for them.

Being willing to be a learner as a parent involves recognizing that the devil is not an imaginary, funny cartoon character dressed in red underwear with a pitchfork or simply a philosophical idea that has nothing to do with reality. No, he is very real, and he is out to deceive us, to blind us to truth in order to keep us from learning how to combat him. He is doing everything he can, in concert with the world and our flesh, to keep us from learning how to successfully train our children. He wants to keep us from realizing that the battle is a spiritual one, and indeed we wrestle not with flesh and blood but with him. If he can do so, his chances of success in his task of neutralizing us and our children as forces for extending Jesus’ rule on the earth will greatly increase.

We naturally parent as we were parented – even if we consciously recognize the mistakes our parents made. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard “I vowed I would never (whatever mistakes their parents made), and I find myself doing it over and over again.”

Breaking that syndrome involves taking a step that many Christian parents find very difficult to take. It is a step that takes us from the theoretical to the actual and from high-sounding, doctrinally correct, pious platitudes to genuine, authentic living. It is a step that, more than any other, breaks down barriers between you and your children and clears the way for them to be open to your leadership and instruction. Without this step, parenting by the gospel is impossible, yet it causes many Christian parents to stumble, and some even find it an impossible step to take. What is it?

The step is this: While seeing clearly our righteousness in Jesus Christ and that “there is no condemnation for those who are in Him,” we do not cover, excuse, deny or ignore the sin that is constantly with us, residing in our flesh. On the contrary, the Holy Spirit, in conjunction with the law of God and the circumstances He brings into our lives, is progressively illuminating our sin to us, like peeling off the multiple skins of an onion. Living by faith means we will humbly and ruthlessly embrace that sin as it is revealed to us and repent. This repentance is not just to God, privately in our prayer closet while we continue to hide behind a righteous, pious, sinless front to those around us, including our families; it includes confession of the sin the Spirit makes known to us to all with whom we associate as we “walk in the light” together.

Nothing brings down the walls between a parent and a rebellious teen-ager as effectively as the parent recognizing his own sin (there is always sin on both sides of a broken relationship) and repenting. It is foolish for us as parents to hesitate to do this, because our children are already much more aware of our sin than we are! This opens the way for them, as they watch us lead in repenting, to learn to recognized their own sin and repent as well.

Over the past few weeks we have exposed the enemies that are out to discourage, defeat and destroy your best efforts as a parent to bring up your children in the “training and admonition of the Lord” (Ephesians 6:4). What hope do you have to be able to stand against the attacks on your family by the pagan culture around you (the world), your own personal failures and inadequacies (the flesh) and the subtle, often unseen attempts by the devil to steal your posterity?

First is the concept of “renewing your mind” that Paul introduces in Romans 12, Ephesians 4 and Titus 2. After being a serious Christian for fifty years, and going through the parenting years recognizing the importance of my parenting job and trying my very best to do it by the Bible, it has been extremely difficult for me as a certified Pharisee to realize that I don’t know pretty much all there is to know about being a parent.

However, recent struggles in relating to my married children has exposed me as an arrogant, difficult-to-entreat, know-it-all father who is very resistant to facing the fact that the renewing of my mind has not as yet been fully accomplished! I have painfully realized that I still have much to learn. I have verbalized that for years--that is what “humble” people like me are supposed to say, isn’t it?

A renewed mind understands that my perceived humility is really pride in how far I think I have come spiritually over these fifty years—now undoubtedly a player on God’s first team, maybe even the quarterback! A renewed mind understands that a proud man thinks he is humble while a genuinely humble man knows he is proud.

Where are you in this mind renewal process?

It is amazing how my proclivity to live by the law as a Pharisee sticks to me like glue. As a parent of adult children, I still subconsciously hold them to a standard of performance in spite of all I consciously know and believe to the contrary. Living by the law as a parent is worked into the fabric of my flesh, (enemy #II) and there is nothing I can do about it but confess it and repent, and then cast myself on God to change me.

Today we are discussing Enemy #III, the devil himself and all his legions of fallen angels who do his bidding in the spirit world. He is always attempting to blunt the impact of the true gospel of the grace of God on Christian parents. His methods have not changed over the years as he uses the world and our flesh against us. Paul says, “We are not ignorant of his devices” (2 Corinthians 2:11.) Satan has been defeated at the cross and all his legitimate authority stripped from him. What power does he then have? What are “his devices?” Should we fear him? Is he indeed “alive and well on planet earth” as a book from an earlier time proclaimed? Every serious parent can more fully equip himself for success in his parenting task by finding answers to these questions.

To be successful as a parent it is crucial that you be aware of the very real enemies that are arrayed against you. They are out to thwart you in your parenting mission of seeing your posterity actively involved in man’s purpose of extending God’s kingdom over the earth. Last week we saw that “the world” is the first of those enemies, and the pressure to conform to it, particularly its way of thinking—acceptance based on performance--is a constant temptation. To remember that God loves me and is pleased with me just as I am, right now, not in any way dependent on my performance, is the basis for in turn loving my child in the same way. It is that love that opens his heart to my input, correction, teaching and ultimately to joining with me in our great task of seeing the “glory of the Lord cover the earth as the waters cover the sea” (Habakkuk 2:14).

Our second enemy with which we must be aware is what the Bible calls “the flesh,” all that we are as descendents of Adam. Since the Garden of Eden the default mode of our fallen flesh is to live by the law of God—the “knowledge of good and evil.” We either try to keep it in order to please God or self-consciously break it to rebel against Him. In both cases we are "living by the law." We tend to think that the big problems with the flesh are immorality, ambition for fame and power and the deceitfulness of riches, all representing “failures” to keep God’s law. Of course, those temptations are very real to us all. They represent the rebellion ditch on one side of the road of “living by faith.” That is Satan’s frontal attack on the church and he is often successful, as church leaders are falling into these obvious sins all around us.

However, for believers who are serious about joining with God in the family business of assaulting the gates of Hell, Satan generally and more successfully uses a guerrilla attack that is more subtle and wicked. Religion, or self-righteousness, is far more dangerous than rebellion because it is much more difficult to spot. Self-righteousness is based on the successes of the old Adam rather than his failures, which, of course, are so much more easily recognized as sin. The successful performance of religious duties, our spiritual pretensions, our theological knowledge, our religious ambition or our pride in our lack of overt sin all take us from faith and place us in the ditch on the other side of the “walking by faith” road—the self-righteous or Pharisee ditch. It is in this ditch where I very comfortably resided during my years as a parent raising three children, blissfully unaware that I was among those Pharisees for whom Jesus reserved his harshest words.

The whole concept of “Gospel Parenting” is that there is a metaphysical aspect to parenting that goes beyond methods, techniques and systems involving cook-book recipes--parenting how-to's. We are in the midst of looking at some of these foundational ideas that govern a parent’s ultimate effectiveness in his parenting task. The how-to’s are important—once the spiritual foundation is in place. We will look at some very helpful how-to’s in future weeks.

Last week we looked at two “fuzzy truths” that must be understood clearly before we can expect to be successful parents: 1.) The true nature of our condition as depraved sinners, and 2.) The true nature of our conversion—death to our old way of life living by obedience to the law, and resurrection to a new way of life of living by faith alone.

It is difficult for us to embrace these truths fully—we want to compromise each “just a little bit.” We don’t see ourselves as really all that bad, and we hold on to the idea of living by the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil—the law--because that’s all we’ve ever known. But we fail to see the extent of the wickedness of our hearts and the law’s purpose as a mirror to show us our sin and not as a scrub brush to clean us up. We need a brand new beginning, a “restart” into the life of living by faith alone. That new beginning happened for us at the cross of Jesus Christ and at His resurrection. As Paul teaches so clearly, we were “in Christ” when those events occurred historically, and they become real to us now “by faith.”

But there are three enemies afoot that are arrayed against us to attempt to keep us from personally experiencing that death and resurrection and ultimately to destroy us and our families. They are deceiving us to move from faith to obedience to the law as a way to live, either by tempting us by rebellion—looking at the law and deliberately breaking it, ignoring it or changing it, or by religion (self-righteousness)—looking at the law and congratulating ourselves for keeping it or berating ourselves because we have broken it. Both religion and rebellion are ultimately identical—both results of living by the law and not by faith in the Holy Spirit within. It is crucial that we be aware of their presence and the nature of their attacks. Who are these three enemies?